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I miss living in New York a lot, especially when I find out about exhibits like this I could be going to see!

From the MoMA website:

“Color Chart celebrates a paradox: the lush beauty that results when contemporary artists assign color decisions to chance, readymade source, or arbitrary system. Midway through the twentieth century, long-held convictions regarding the spiritual truth or scientific validity of particular colors gave way to an excitement about color as a mass-produced and standardized commercial product. The Romantic quest for personal expression instead became Andy Warhol’s “I want to be a machine;” the artistry of mixing pigments was eclipsed by Frank Stella’s “Straight out of the can; it can’t get better than that.” Color Chart is the first major exhibition devoted to this pivotal transformation, featuring work by some forty artists ranging from Ellsworth Kelly and Gerhard Richter to Sherrie Levine and Damien Hirst.”

I say, not necessarily a paradox; color is color and color = beauty, in my view. Simplistic yes, but this is almost always true! It’s hard to get it “wrong” especially if you are using some kind of system.

Here are a few of the things you will see at the exhibit:

Elsworth Kelly’s Colors for A Large Wall

Rauschenberg’s Rebus

And here is one that I’d really like to see; it is shown with others of its kind:

David Batchelor’s Found Monochromes

If you are not living in the New York area, you can see the online exhibition here.

They’ve did a great job with this; everything is easy to use and you can enlarge things, move things, listen to commentary or just read it– but of course it’s not the same as being there.